Scotland — Part 2. Finaly, The Castle, the kilt and bagpipes.
“The Castle was a brute of a building, all fairy-tale Scottish from below, but once you were within its glowering walls, it was dank and doom-laden. … The Castle seemed not so much a product of engineering as of organic growth, the dressed stone fused with the rough black basalt of the rock and its own bloody history.”
- Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (Jackson Brodie Series #2)
Edinburgh Castle, aka, The Castle, dominates. It just is. All other castles need names, embellishments, provenances to go with them. Not THE CASTLE. Its history is the history of Scotland. It is Scotland.
Before I go into a few dates — trust me, I am not going to bore (or amuse) anyone with too much history, I want to remind my readers that I am a collector of jokes and stories. With stories, like any obsessive, I tell them to myself over and over again, polishing them, until they shine, like my private jewels. With very few exceptions, I love sharing good stories with people. One story of the Edinburgh Castle reverberated in me like a gong of a clearest bell. So that is the story I will tell.
Anyone can look at pictures of the cobblestone streets, the rain-slicked and fog-shrouded Scotland and see that history lives side-by-side with modern, tourist buses and smaller vehicles crowding the…
